Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

What is the status of adult large print collections in public libraries across the United States? This nationwide survey explored adult large print collections, methods of collection development, librarian views of adult large print users, and the services surrounding these users. Responses were collected from all 50 states, from rural to urban settings, standalone to library systems, and all sizes of adult large print collections. Overall, adult large print collections continue to be a vital collection utilized by public libraries in their services to older adults.

Comic books and their characters are an integral part of popular culture. However, comic books, as educational material, still remain controversial in certain education systems, as this medium is regarded by some as sheer entertainment – thereby hindering students’ motivation to seek out other more formal, text-based literature to read. For this study, a region-wide questionnaire survey was sent out to explore school librarians’ perceptions and attitudes towards the educational value of comic books in Taiwan. A total of 789 responses were collected for this questionnaire survey study. The regression model was used to identify the causal relationship between different genres of comic books and students’ voluntary reading and learning incentives in the context of the school library. Findings from this study suggest that comic books (1) carry the potential to attract more students to visit the school library after class, (2) facilitate students’ reading comprehension skills and (3) foster students’ interest in voluntary reading. Because of this medium’s visual-based and serialised narrative approach to storytelling, findings of this study also suggest that comic books could function as a reading motivational tool, particularly useful in helping their students learn about the subjects of History and Science.

This study explores the employment-related information seeking behaviour of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study conducted semi-structured interviews with 60 Bangladeshi immigrants in Ontario, Canada, and obtained 205 survey responses. The study highlights the centrality of employment-related settlement among Bangladeshi immigrants in Ontario and reports many immigrants not being able to utilize their education and skills after arrival in Canada. The results show that Bangladeshi immigrants utilize various information sources for their employment in Canada, including friends and professional colleagues, online searchers, and settlement agencies. Although Bangladeshi immigrants utilized a large array of information sources for meeting their employment-related information needs, many interview participants emphasized that the employment-related benefits they received was because of their access to friends and professional colleagues in Canada. The survey results echoed the interview findings. The cross-tabulation results on post-arrival information sources and occupation status as well as first job information sources and occupational status in Canada show a significant association among the use of the information source “friends and professional colleagues in Canada” and immigrants’ occupational status. The study highlights the benefits of professional colleagues among immigrants in employment-related settlement contexts. It also reports the challenges faced by many immigrant professionals related to employment-related settlement because of the lack of access to their professional friends and colleagues in Canada. The author urges the Federal Government of Canada, provincial governments, and settlement agencies working with newcomers to offer services that would connect highly skilled immigrants with their professional networks in Canada, in order to get proper guidance related to obtaining a professional job or alternative career. The author calls for further studies on employment-related information seeking by immigrants to better understand the role information plays in their settlement in a new country.

Existing models of the information behaviour of various liberal professionals, especially lawyers, lack currentness. They do not adequately represent the full scope of how these professionals de facto attain information in their occupation. Without clarity about the contemporary information-gathering practice of liberal professionals in a workplace setting, scholars, technology entrepreneurs and policy makers might be relying on partial or outdated grounds, and the ability of the information specialists to provide an effective service for their patrons might also be hindered. With a focus on legal professionals, as they have experienced noteworthy changes in their occupation, purposive sampling was applied, and 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with practising lawyers in Israel. Participants were nationwide and ranged over 30 different areas of legal practice, with a fair diversity of other professionals and personal traits achieved. The content analysis revealed four distinctive forms in which lawyers in Israel gather information within the contemporary legal practice: (a) self-executed information-seeking, (b) mediated acquisition of information, (c) information discovery and (d) combined information-gathering – which in all compile 10 different habitual strategies of gathering information in their professional work. Finally, the study suggests a revised, integrative and inclusive model that provides a more accurate and profound understanding of legal professionals’ information-gathering practice. This comprehensive and current framework may serve as an insightful guide for understanding other information-rich liberal professions.

In 1967, the University of Maryland’s School of Library and Information Services created a public library in Prince George’s County, Maryland, named the High John Experiment, to give Librarianship and Information Science students experience serving disadvantaged communities and to discover new methods to better serve these communities. From the creation of High John to the present day, University of Maryland publications and unaffiliated works credit High John as a groundbreaking experiment that propelled interests in diversity and inclusion in public libraries. High John’s creators published a 73 paged report for the United States’ Office of Education, accompanied by published articles, that confirms a violation of ethics toward the community High John served. The community was not involved in the implementation or planning of the library and many of the services and materials the library offered were based on prejudiced assumptions instead of community input or research. Although High John garnered supporters, the validity and ethicality behind High John’s intent and methods were called into question during the experiment. The controversy led to debates within the field that resulted in conversations about Librarianship and Information Science pedagogy and appropriate methods in outreach and community engagement for disadvantaged communities. Now that the passionately fueled debates on High John have ceased, the experiment is a distant memory. Although this experiment led to debates about diversity, inclusion, and equity in information access within the United States, this experiment is relevant to information readers on a global scale. Because Librarianship and Information Science has a history rooted in elitism and oppression worldwide, High John warrants further exposure and examination from a diverse pool of contemporary perspectives. Through the application of modern community outreach and engagement practices, this article builds on a critical historical analysis of the experiment and argues High John failed in its mission and violated the community’s trust that it purported to serve.

As organisations that collect and maintain cultural artefacts, independent libraries make important contributions to cultural sustainability. Surfacing and elaborating on these contributions has the potential to establish their value to wider sustainable development agendas. However, sustainability policy and research across the gallery, library, archive and museum sectors tends to focus on environmental, social and economic concerns. The small number of studies that do consider cultural sustainability tend to focus on the role of galleries, libraries, archives and museums in heritage preservation, without consideration of their role in sustaining culture through the three other key areas of preserving and promoting cultural identity, cultural diversity and cultural vitality. In addition, previous studies do not consider the role of culture in enabling sustainability at an organisational level. Complementing previous research on the relationship between museums and cultural sustainability (conducted in Australia, Cyprus and Romania), this study seeks to expand understanding of the relationship between galleries, libraries, archives and museums and cultural sustainability in the context of the independent library sectors in the United Kingdom and the United States. Semi-structured interviews conducted with professionals from independent libraries in both countries employed a card-based game method to explore the key areas of cultural sustainability in which their organisations can contribute. Interviews also explored the challenges associated with achieving organisational sustainability, together with the organisational values that impact the sustainability of independent libraries. The research identifies a series of supportive and conflicting relationships between the contributions that independent libraries make to each of the four key areas of cultural sustainability, as well as the organisational values that can inhibit or assist organisational sustainability. Resulting in a framework to assist in the management of internal organisational sustainability and contributions to external cultural sustainability agendas in independent libraries, it provides a new perspective to support understanding of the relationship between galleries, libraries, archives and museums and cultural sustainability.

The use of reference management software in the context of academic work and research is the main subject of this study. The study focuses on the extent to which postgraduate students at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, one of the largest Greek universities, make use of – or avoid using – reference management software tools to organize their bibliographic databases and to automate the process of creating references and citations. The study also tries to find out which are the key factors for their choices and whether certain background characteristics affect their behavior. It should be mentioned that no previous studies have been conducted in Greece regarding the use of reference management software in the academic environment. An online questionnaire was sent to the postgraduate students at the University and a result set of 545 responses was collected and analyzed. The majority (almost two-thirds) of the respondents identified themselves as non-users and one-third identified themselves as reference management software users. Among the latter, Mendeley was found to be the software used by more than two-thirds of the users and was followed by EndNote and Zotero. It is worth mentioning that Mendeley is the software officially recommended by the University’s central library to its users but most of the students (more than 60%) were not aware of this fact. In terms of background characteristics, the analysis revealed, among other things, statistically significant relationships between degree level, student discipline and preferences, reference management software features, and potential future use of reference management software.

Public libraries offer a large selection of books. For many library users, one of the highlights of the library visit is to explore this collection in search of interesting books that will provide enriching literary experiences. For some people, however, mainstream books might not be motivating to read, for instance, due to reading impairments, language challenges or inaccessible content. Consequently, most libraries also hold a collection of ‘special books’. In Norway, one example of such a collection is the books developed by the association Books for Everyone. This article explores the organization and promotion of adapted books in Norwegian libraries and is based on two datasets. The first dataset comprises the complete production by Books for Everyone, consisting of 232 titles. These books were examined to get an overview of the material commonly found in Norwegian public libraries, with a focus on the allocation of adaptation types and target groups. This dataset showed a diverse collection of books in six different categories. The majority was in the category ‘Easy to Read’, targeted at a broad variety of user groups. The second dataset consisted of survey data from 178 libraries regarding their organization and promotion of the Books for Everyone collection. The data revealed differences in how public libraries utilize these books, due to, for instance, a lack of knowledge about adapted books and potential target groups. Moreover, for many libraries, these books were regarded as ‘special books’ and were consequently not included in exhibitions or book talks. It may be necessary to pay more attention towards adapted literature in the library community and provide more knowledge about this literature among librarians. The overall purpose of this article is to provide some advice to librarians and other practitioners on how to deal with adapted books in a public library context.

As secondary data become increasingly integrated into research and coursework across a widening variety of fields and disciplines, data reference is gaining traction as a major area of library research support. To examine the current landscape of data reference, we distributed a survey via regional and international library listservs asking librarians about their experiences and opinions related to their data reference work. For this paper, the full collected dataset was limited to only academic librarians who answer at least one data reference question per month in order to identify the unique needs of respondents doing reference work in academic institutions, with the ultimate goal of improving our own work as academic librarians at our institution. We used a grounded theory approach to analyze the qualitative survey response data, and supplemented this analysis with descriptive statistics and chi-square tests for the quantitative responses. Through this analysis, we identify a theoretical framework consisting of three themes relating to limitations to success where librarians must advocate for change in order to maintain and improve high-quality data reference work in the academic sphere: (1) technology and resource limitations, such as substandard database interfaces; (2) institutional limitations, such as insufficient staff time or resources dedicated to data reference; and (3) personal limitations, such as a lack of data skills. While librarians have varying levels of influence over each of these three areas, identifying and targeting these categories can help librarians and other data professionals focus resources and build cases for additional support from their library and campus administrators.

The purpose of this study is to explore Personal Digital Archiving, and its practices, reasons, and challenges in desktop and in ubiquitous environment such as desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones or smartphones, tablets, and cloud services. Moreover, it is also aimed to develop a model of Personal Digital Archiving process for desktop and ubiquitous devices. This study used Preferred Reporting Items for the Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis guidelines for searching and devising, and inclusion and exclusion criteria. The Search was conducted from selected repositories, databases, and core journals, potentially containing studies related with Personal Digital Archiving. Consequently, 21 studies were included through identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion of studies process. It was found that people used multiple devices such as mobile phones or smartphones along with other devices. It was established that people had also used cloud services with different devices including computers and smartphones or tablets for Personal Digital Archiving. Five major categories of individuals’ Personal Digital Archiving practices, that is, backup, replication or duplication, reorganizing and updating, cleaning or removing, and migration of information were found. Moreover, emotional motives, technological causes, alternative access, easy retrieval, and task completion were the reasons to adopt Personal Digital Archiving. On the basis of findings of selected studies, researchers developed a four steps model of Personal Digital Archiving process, consisting of initiation, identification, action, and evaluation constructs. Personal Digital Archiving challenges were also identified such as the individuals had to face through the use of desktop and ubiquitous devices including technical, fragmented and overloaded information, lack of training and expertise, and psychological and miscellaneous challenges. Personal Digital Archiving process model is based on the extracted data from studies published worldwide, and it is useful for both desktop and ubiquitous devices with reference to Personal Information Management context. The findings of the study will be helpful for software designers and android application developers to design and develop users’ centered Personal Information Management software.

Many children in the USA spend a significant amount of time in center-based childcare. However, research has yet to explore their information practices in this setting. This study investigates young children’s perceptions of the concept of information and their own information-seeking practices within the context of their day care classroom. The participants included 13 children between three and five years of age. Data was collected using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, child-led photo tours, and photo-elicitation interviews. The findings indicate that the children did not perceive the concept of information in a manner consistent with adult understandings of the term, and that they engaged in information-seeking related to finding out new things on their own, through interactions with others, and through classroom resources, activities, and routines. The findings have implications for both researchers and practitioners working with young children.